I was at a lecture a while back where the speaker was talking about the coming of a rapturous technological singularity. For those not already steeped in this lore, the idea of a technological singularity is that some technological event (advance) will happen in the (near) future which completely changes human civilization. Its sorta vague, and sometimes involves the idea of intelligent robots becoming so smart they can build even better robots than we ourselves could make, puny beings that we are. (I actually think its already happened and its called internet porn, but I guess thats not quite scifi enough for some people)
At this particular lecture, a rather less than impressed physics professor, pointed out that the “singularity” part of the metaphor was wrongheaded, the proper, more descriptive, phrase should be “technological event horizon”, but accuracy of metaphors not withstanding, I keep hearing the ‘singularity’ phrase.
So will every BSG fanboy’s fantasy of sexy intelligent robots ever come true? And will they have sex with us.. and then kill us? I certainly don’t know, but this guy seems to think that not only will robots REQUIRE emotions to be intelligent, but he seems to think its a good idea to teach them how to lie.
And this is the part I love…
I believe that it is possible – if we start to model the way human beings reason about things – to achieve much more flexible processing of storylines, plans, even understanding how human beings behave.
Intelligence as narrative, how utterly Postmodern.